Help for the Homeless

Every Effort Counts

I love writing about positive news items! Just after watching more scenes of refugees in Mosul queuing for food and a mother’s sad account of how hard it is to explain to her hungry children why maybe there would be no food left for them, I heard something very positive about our UK homeless.

I visit London often to be at our London Lodge (now re-housed in comfortable rooms in the Friends’ Meeting House near Trafalgar Square), and I am often shocked to see the number of sad figures huddled in their sleeping bags in doorways and underground stations.

Everyone must long for a solution to this problem and I know many charities are doing their best to help. Even individuals—and this is what struck me as I watched the local news item. It was decided to buy an old bus and convert it into a shelter for up to twenty homeless people. (In the process, also helping them find work.) The project (the idea of one individual) has turned out to be so successful that more old buses are now to be bought in a number of big cities throughout the UK. Hurray! This shows that individual efforts and ideas really can make a difference.

Our Star prayers are invaluable too, as they encourage everyone to do something if they can, whether by gift, action or prayers. As White Eagle says:

‘Every individual life, however humble, however simple, is of vast importance in the great plan. Every effort you can make to send forth the God-vibration is a contribution to God’s work. Every effort which we make in the silence to send forth good, to send forth that vibration which is of God, and the love quality, is a great service to humanity.’